Callaloo

I am Margo Crawford and I am at Cornell University. I’m going to start today with a real focus on Charles Rowell’s interviews. When I think about the tremendous work that you have done, Charles Rowell, with Callaloo, I think we need an entire book or more than one book that puts together the interviews. The interviews set me in motion. The interviews made me understand the connection between the academic and the creative. Charles Rowell’s interviews break the boundaries between the creative and the critical.

I want to start today with two moments (in two of his interviews) when the practice of a black feminist archive emerges in the interviews. For example, when he is interviewing Octavia Butler, and he asks, “Will you talk about what it was like for you in the early days as opposed to present times? You, a Black woman, writing science fiction?” Another example (in another interview of Butler) is the moment when he takes us to an interiority of black feminist praxis, and asks, “Will you allow me to enter the privacy of your writing space and stand over your shoulder while you’re working and observe the process while you work?” Think about such humility. We hear, “Will you allow me?” I think of those tremendously interesting moments when Charles Rowell’s interviews become so much more than just the standard interviews. We see all of the creative and critical energy coming together.

His editing of Callaloo as this thriving and prominent journal continues to gather the most innovative, diasporic literature is indeed that zone that Fred Moten describes as “frames cutting frames” without any settlement. As Fred Moten teaches us, they keep cutting. Rowell’s 1974 interview of Larry Neal was the gem that sparked my first engagements with Neal’s dual position as theorist and poet. And today, I want to use—in these fifteen minutes I have—Larry Neal’s Hoodoo Hollerin’ Beebop Ghosts of 1974 as a means of opening up the Callaloo hoodoo hollerin’ beebop practice of creating liminal spaces, where the creative and the critical become what Larry Neal in his afterword to Black Fire considers the post-double consciousness state of decolonizing the mind. Larry Neal’s worrying of the lines—thank you, Cheryl Wall—takes the form in his visually experimental essay “Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic” of intersecting rows and columns, instead of [End Page 54] the typical paragraph structure. The layering and crossing of lines in “Some Reflections” create a visual and verbal sense of depth.

As Neal the poet meets Neal the critic in this manifesto, it is clear that he is using lines and layers to dramatize the title of his poetry volume, Black Boogaloo. In Charles Rowell’s interview of Neal, Rowell asks, “What do you mean by ‘Black Boogaloo’? I know Boogaloo to be a dance. You also use the adjective, black, before it. Boogaloo suggests something black or something related to Black people.” [Laughter] As this interview becomes the co-creation of Boogaloo, Larry Neal hears the redundancy in “Black Boogaloo.” I think Charles Rowell teaches him. [Laughter] Neal tells Rowell, “Maybe I should’ve just called it Boogaloo, it’s superfluous.” [Laughter] “It’s superfluous to put black on Boogaloo.” Like this interview, Callaloo has always been that space of co-creation of the creative and the critical. Neal saw Hoodoo Hollerin’ Bebop Ghosts after Black Boogaloo as the letting go of the superfluous, as a move to Boogaloo that did not have to announce itself as black. Neal argues in his afterword to the 1968 foundational Black Arts anthology, Black Fire, that the Black Arts Movement is a conscious move past the trauma of double consciousness. Larry Neal insists, “Most contemporary black writers of the last few years, the literature of the young, has been aimed at...